`Lost Tomb' raises intriguing questions

Film claims burial plot is that of Holy Family

`The Lost Tomb of Jesus" sounds like the breathless moniker of the next novel from "Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown, but it's actually the name of a Discovery Channel documentary airing 8 p.m. Sunday.

Still, the two-hour special does come across, especially in its expertly paced first half, as a beguiling mixture of "Da Vinci"-style biblical mystery combined with elements of "CSI" and even Fox's middlebrow procedural "Bones."

It's unlikely that it will ever be definitively proved, especially to academia's satisfaction, that the ancient tomb discovered at a Jerusalem construction site in 1980 and re-opened for this special is actually that of Jesus and his clan. But it's hard to watch this exhaustive, intriguing film and not come away thinking that the people behind "Lost Tomb" make a reasonably compelling case for at least some of their claims.

The evidence and theories behind "Lost Tomb" are so compelling, in fact, that Hollywood big shot James Cameron signed on as an executive producer of the program, and Ted Koppel, who now works for Discovery Channel, will host a panel discussion on the documentary's controversial findings immediately after the special airs.

Through modern-day footage shot on location, talking-head interviews and that cable-documentary standby, the re-enactment, viewers are quickly told the story of the tomb uncovered in Talpiot, Jerusalem, 27 years ago (re-enactments with bearded, robed figures evoke events that may have happened in biblical times). Though construction managers were eager to get on with building an apartment complex, archeologists were able to map the burial place and retrieve several ossuaries, or boxes of human remains, before it was sealed.

The bones themselves were buried, according to Jewish custom, but the boxes sat in a warehouse, until Simcha Jacobovici, the director of the film, started poking around and asking about the markings on the ossuaries.

And that's where this special gets really interesting. Without going into too much detail (which the special does at times, perhaps in an attempt to buttress its claims), there are variations on some of the names on the boxes that seem to strongly imply that they could be those of Mary Magdalene, Jesus' mother Mary and various close associates (or, as this film has it, brothers) of Jesus.

There's also one ossuary marked "Jesus son of Joseph."

A statistician is called in to calculate the odds of so many names associated with Jesus' life being found in one place. DNA experts test two samples from the boxes -- from the ossuary supposedly belonging to Mary Magdalene and from the one that allegedly contained the earthly remains of Jesus -- and find that they did not share a mother, and could not have been mother and son.

(One wonders why other DNA samples were not taken from other ossuaries, to show whether they were in fact related -- but then perhaps there were some questions even these questing filmmakers didn't want answered.)

Regarding Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the filmmakers wonder whether the two could have been married (it was unlikely to find unrelated people in a family tomb). If that's not enough speculation for you, they also posit that Jesus and Mary Magdalene (and the latter, they strongly imply, was one of Jesus' foremost disciples) may have had a child together.

Yes, it's all very "Da Vinci Code," but there are real scholarly experts weighing in on the evidence found at Talpiot and giving their sometimes skeptical, sometimes encouraging views on the filmmakers' various suppositions. At times, Jacobovici and his associates seem to be reaching when making some of their more controversial claims, and the director is quick to decide that the burial place they are talking about is, in his words, "the Holy Family tomb."

At the same time, some experts, especially one of the curators of the Israel Museum interviewed for the film, seem to be extremely reluctant to say that Jacobovici's claims have any merit whatsoever. And of course even the mildest of the "Lost Tomb" theories will be upsetting to Christians who believe that Jesus ascended into heaven after his resurrection, body and all.

It's up to archeologists, biblical scholars, historians and other experts to decide whether the claims in "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" have any real merit. But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that even if these filmmakers haven't come up with definitive answers, they've uncovered some extraordinarily interesting questions.